Crime and Punishment of the future

[Water]

I don't mean punishing the future, you silly.

As a probation officer I'm curious about how others who are passionate about the future predict or hope crime and punishment will look like.

My job working with detainees and inmates, requires me to keep my eyes on the greater good for society - sharply focus on rehabilitation only and put personal feelings and judgement aside. It made me increasingly allergic to how the public responds to news about criminals - especially on social media. "Hang them, torture them, bring back the death penalty", and the inevitable contest between people to see who can come up with the worst torture because wishing pain on criminals makes you a good person (it doesn't, it makes you the same as the cheering mass around burning stakes during the middle ages).
The actual victims of the crime or their loved ones in my opinion get a free pass because of their emotional involvement though. I know I might want a criminal to suffer if they did something to my loved ones. However, I think a justice system shouldn't listen to me in that case, and only have the criminal compensate to me in a practically positive way (therefore I still believe in fines).

My work has gradually led me to believe that prisons will somewhere in the future be considered outdated, that the goal of retribution will fizzle out of the justice system, and the sole focus will be on rehabilitation and practical compensation only. As I said, this would still involve fines as compensation for damage and/or taking the freedom away from a dangerous individual for safety measures, but without the goal of satisfying the desire for retribution.

I predict this development based on several things I observe:

• The correlation between the forward progress of civilization (wealth/health/happiness/education/technology), and the abolishment of torture
• The correlation between the forward progress of civilization, and the abolishment of capital punishment
• The correlation between the forward progress of civilization, and liberalism (according to its politically ideological definition)

I'm already seeing this happening in Scandinavian prison systems.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48885846

I get how one would find it outrageous, call it a hotel, say that criminals don't deserve to live like this. And yeah it does look even better than what I've lived in as a student. But that shouldn't be the problem. The way forward is to ask ourselves what works, even if it leaves a sour taste in our mouths. The biggest hurdle might be to understand that the worst kind of scum got to be that way through either nature (i.e. sick in the head) or nurture (i.e. messed up by others). The reasonable solution is to fix and/or prevent that rather than cause damage to the damaged.

I'm making this thread because despite my believing this to be right and the way we'll deal with crime in the future, my own understanding has a limit. I'll be meeting an accomplice of actual genocide next Thursday. Reading his files, all I can feel is "waste of my time, let him rot". He probably will spend the rest of his life incarcerated anyway no matter what I do (and it therefore is a waste of my time,) but when the damage has been done, it technically doesn't really "do" anything to keep him locked away either.

Ideally, the future will bring us a justice system that does its best to both rehabilitate that kind of a man, and a modern "eye for an eye" that will have him not spend a lifetime in jail, but spend the rest of his life actively giving as much good back to the world as he took from it.

But as of 2022, that'll be out of my/our hands for a long time.

TL;DR What do you think? Do you agree with me, or do you expect a "pill" that will halt criminal thoughts, the drug that slows the perception of time to compress 10 years in prison into 1 hour, or we might bring back the harsher methods from the past?

[Lorem Ipsum]

do you expect a "pill" that will halt criminal thoughts

This but with a "perfected" lobotomy, non-surgical (nanobots) or not.
Meanwhile/Otherwise:

or we might bring back the harsher methods from the past

[caltrek]

@ Water,

Good topic for a thread, especially in the Culture, Economics & Politics of the Future forum. Hopefully, in part by being placed in this forum, you will get a lot of thoughtful comments instead of article citations.

I do trust that you are aware of this thread in the News and Discussion forum: http://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/vie ... 6&start=10.

[weatheriscool]

I think we need to adopt some arabian practices like if you steal you lose your fingers and if you loot the owner of the store has a right to shoot you. This would put an end to such crap real fast.

[Vakanai]

In the future, there'll be less criminals because the "War on Drugs" will be recognized as the folly it is, marijuana will be legalized as it always should have been, addicts will be treated as victims/ill instead of as criminals, and drugs will be more of a health issue instead of a criminal one.
As for actual punishment, I hope that in the future we realize "punishment" is idiotic and instead we lean into what the prison system should be about, rehabilitation. Where instead of locking people away and doing nothing but making their lives hell, then releasing them, we instead seek to educate them while they're in prison, give them anger management sessions, therapy, counseling, etc. And that when we do release them back into society, we give them means to find employment and access to continued counseling to reduce recidivism rates.

[funkervogt]

that the goal of retribution will fizzle out of the justice system,

The victims of violent crime and their families will resist this.

[funkervogt]

I've never been in prison or worked in one, but I have secondhand knowledge of what it's like in the U.S. Most Americans would be surprised and even shocked at the conditions inside their prisons, which violate many intuitive standards of human rights and approach what you'd expect to find in Third World countries. Among other things, I'm talking about arbitrary and nonsensical rules that block inmates from doing simple things, abusive and low-IQ guards who always close ranks to protect each other from punishment, and a slew of serious problems with living conditions.

As just one example of the latter, I know a guy who was recently released from jail after being found not guilty of a felony. He shared a cell with several other inmates, and they had one toilet in the room. One day it became detached from the floor, so there was no longer a waterproof seal between the two, and every time someone flushed the toilet, some of the waste-laden water that was in the bowl would seep out onto the floor. They reported this to the guards, but it wasn't fixed for weeks, forcing them to try fixing it on their own using crude techniques and materials they had in the cell (nothing worked). This happened in an American jail in 2022.

I don't think prison should be fun, but it shouldn't be constant torment over the smallest things, either. It's self-defeating for society to send criminals to jails that are so awful the people come out even more maladjusted than when they entered. At the same time, a truly "enlightened" view of crime and punishment would shed all biases, including liberal ones, and would recognize that some people simply can't be rehabilitated or fixed. Psychopaths, for example, can't be made to feel empathy, and are permanent threats to everyone around them. The same is true for people with certain types of brain damage. A better criminal justice system would impose some kind of constant monitoring of those kinds of people, even after their release from prison.

To a large extent, the poor conditions are due to a lack of money. When it comes to allocating government budgets, prisons are among the lowest priorities. If automation and other future technologies make us richer than we are now, conditions in prisons will naturally improve.

[Vakanai]

Something related to crime and punishment in the future - I truly hope we put an end to "for profit" prisons. It's just a terrible thing altogether.

[Water]

that the goal of retribution will fizzle out of the justice system,

The victims of violent crime and their families will resist this.

I more or less addressed that here:

I know I might want a criminal to suffer if they did something to my loved ones. However, I think a justice system shouldn't listen to me in that case, and only have the criminal compensate to me in a practically positive way

I know I'd decry the very system I now root for and predict for the future, but that doesn't intrinsically mean that my personal feelings of what suffering should be experienced by the cause defines what's justice and good. For example:

I think we need to adopt some arabian practices like if you steal you lose your fingers and if you loot the owner of the store has a right to shoot you. This would put an end to such crap real fast.

Basic criminology shows that these methods do not deter crime at all and are typically practiced in cultures with high crime rate. Sure, it does give a sadistic satisfaction to the owner of the store and surrounding sensation seekers. You get to think "so there", and that's it. The bigger picture, however, shows a person who lost the fingers with which he could have been made to compensate for his crimes to society in a, positive, practical manner, while also worsening his poverty, which in turn is a motive for crime.

In the future, there'll be less criminals because the "War on Drugs" will be recognized as the folly it is, marijuana will be legalized as it always should have been, addicts will be treated as victims/ill instead of as criminals, and drugs will be more of a health issue instead of a criminal one.
As for actual punishment, I hope that in the future we realize "punishment" is idiotic and instead we lean into what the prison system should be about, rehabilitation. Where instead of locking people away and doing nothing but making their lives hell, then releasing them, we instead seek to educate them while they're in prison, give them anger management sessions, therapy, counseling, etc. And that when we do release them back into society, we give them means to find employment and access to continued counseling to reduce recidivism rates.

I think I can agree, but only if a life sentence is reshaped into a situation where a criminal is sentenced to a lifetime of active indebtment towards the victim or their loved ones (and if they don't have loved ones, to society as a whole) - regardless of successful rehabilitation. And honestly, that about sums up what I believe will be the shape of crime and punishment in the future of post-humanist revolution. Crime doesn't pay, but neither does hatred.

[weatheriscool]